friends & followers, tweeps & peeps—or how mike doughty inadvertently got me to quit facebook
this man would probably not approve of twitter.
the other week former soul coughing frontman turned terrific singer songwriter mike doughty did a thoughtful and honest interview with new hampshire public radio (full 30+ minute version here; 10 minute edit here). at about 14 minutes in, he talks about that moment of discovery you can still have, even after hearing a song million times. coincidently, a couple days later i was listening to jeff buckley’s cover of “hallelujah” (for the millionth time). i was walking my dog and using my ipod with a set of earbuds that have these foam cone things which do a remarkable job of blocking external noise. and, for the first time ever, i heard jeff buckley gasp, for literally just a second, before that first haunting note hits. it stopped me stone cold in my tracks.
i’ve always loved that song, and found it soulful in the way white boys with guitars can be. but hearing that brief little exhalation just knocked me out. like there was this whole other, even deeper level of exhaustion beneath the song that i didn’t even pick up on before. and that made me think of the last time i watched “high fidelity,” one of my all-time favorite movies. there’s a scene in which liz asks the broken-hearted rob gordon, “why do you want laura back so badly?” and the camera flashes to rob’s face, for just a moment, before cutting to the next scene. what i never really noticed, before my most recent viewing, was the look in rob’s face—as if he had never even considered that question before. it was brilliant bit of acting & editing.
and all of this made me think of an article i read (but sadly can’t remember where, in order to link to it) which advocated the position of reading a lot, but fewer writers—as opposed to reading just one or two books from many different authors. the idea being that we as readers can learn more by studying an entire body of one author’s work rather than trying to assimilate the ideas of hundreds. the familiar depth vs. breadth argument. which brings me to facebook.
when i was first shown the facebook ropes by a colleague, he explained it to me as a way for people to main their “thin” connections. not your best/closest friends—but still people you don’t want to lose touch with. the term “social networking” really is the most perfect way you could describe it. its not really forming deep bonds with your fellow human beings, it’s networking. but it’s addictive, isn’t it? facebook has some kind of astronomical retention rate, because once you’re on, you don’t leave it. and even if you do, you’ll still come back.
i’ve heard the argument advanced that all those little status updates can add up to a larger view of a person, but i’m wondering how often that is actually true for facebook users. because that would require some serious reflection time—times however many friends one has on the site. and i’m guessing most users aren’t making that kind of investment. it’s a two- or three-minute escape from whatever other task you need a break from. distractions from distractions. and don’t think i’m oblivious to the irony of me linking to a bunch of stuff in this post. but this is the nature of the web, right?
so this “thin connections” idiom seems like the most perfect phrase, as well. which is kinda what bothers me. if i’m so caught up in maintaining hundreds of thin connections, when am i going to get around to calling up my dear friend from college and chatting for an hour? if i’m so caught up reading blogs everyday, when i am going to read infinite jest a third time, forget about a fifth? if it’s repeat trips to art that give us the most depth—and it’s our closest friends, rather than our followers that mean the most to us—then why the hell are we spending so much time on social networks? and if you think it’s bad now, what on earth are we gonna do when ETEWAF happens? we’ll be pulled in an infinite number of directions. constantly.
the world is too much with us
i realize that this probably makes me sound like a grumpy old man, but this really is a social impulse/addiction (and one which i myself am guilty of) that i do not understand. i whole-heartedly believe in the importance of an open-market for ideas, and that it’s critical for people to hear as diverse a range of opinions as possible. but my gut tells me i’m not going to grasp where the happy medium is between no-facebook and ETEWAF while i’m still obsessively checking status updates. so i’ve decided to check out of social networking (for a little while, at least) and see what happens when i have longer conversations on the phone, or put on monster headphones to listen to some newly acquired hüsker dü records on repeat. ya’all can step back from the facebooks with me for a piece, too—but you punks better keep reading bark in the meantime.
Tags: ETEWAF, Facebook, high fidelity, jeff buckley, mike doughty, new hampshire public radio, Patton Oswalt, wired magazine
“Why create anything new when there’s a mountain of freshly excavated pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate on your iMovie?” –Oswalt (the Etewaf link)
Yep and why create anything when there’s a viral load of people repurposing pop culture? I think that FB has a bad rep, one synonymous with wasting time, but I don’t know think it is. But is it really your thin connections bogging you down, Jason? Or the internet as a whole? Will you ditch twitter, too? Or gmail? or Wikipedia? Or googling? Not FB, the internet itself seems like the bigger part of ETEWAF.
you’re probably right – FB is a symptom, not the problem. i do think the internet is the one of the most extraordinary inventions in history, on par with the gutenberg press in terms of it’s influence. doesn’t change the fact that it deserves it’s bad reputation sometimes. as much as it gives unprecedented amounts of people the opportunity to explore new ideas, it also enables single-minded people to encourage & give false credence to their own extreme views. it works both ways, and people don’t always choose enlightenment over reinforcement.
i don’t waste *that* much time on wikipedia, or googling, but i am giving twitter the boot for a little while, too. ditching e-mail is, for better or worse, not a realistic option. stepping away from facebook (for a while) is just a first step in trying to find a healthy balance between the internet and actual live human interaction. which seems like a pretty good goal to have.
Great post, Jason. But one thing: You can’t listen to a record on repeat.
Selfish reply: what about your close family and friends that live on the other side of the country and don’t get to talk to you on the phone often enough? How are we going to learn that your car has been broken into again so that we can express our sympathy? Or see photos of you & Kent Puppy?
Yes, FB is a way to maintain those thin connections, but I find the people I communicate with most on FB are my closest friends. Before you drop off FB entirely, consider your peeps. We, who are equally busy with our own jobs and families and projects, like seeing your status updates.
I am not a FB apologist. I have plenty of issues with FB, but I also acknowledge that for better or worse, it is a part of almost everyone’s life now. So may I suggest scaling back instead of dropping out?
i’m not going to live on the dark side of the moon. i’m taking a break for a little while. trying to change what i perceive as undesirable behavior: (1) obsessively checking in with facebook, and (2) potentially replacing deeper relationships with easier/more surface-level ones on facebook. or, at least, trying to find a better balance here.
I’m with you, Jason. I’m on facebook (twice, actually; once for me and once for the me I had to create to administer a facebook page for my job), but I’m not a fan of it. The awful design of the thing is enough to irritate me, but mostly I have never understood why someone would want to have hundreds of hazy connections with people. I rarely accept friend requests anymore, and I often reject requests from people I don’t particularly care to talk to. Like some people from high school–we barely knew each other there, have nothing in common, etc. Why would I want to reconnect with someone I never connected with in the first place?
FB’s role for me is as an aggregator. I use it as a sort of address book in case I want to actually communicate with someone through a different medium. And certainly it’s a convenient way to share photographs, I guess.
FB isn’t a bad thing. I’m just a grumpy old man like you. It’s great for lots and lots of people. I don’t begrudge them their success. But I know my personality; it I used it with any kind of regularity, I would become obsessive about responding to every message and update and photo and blah blah blah. It would eat up my life.
So I can tell you that limiting your facebook time is truly freeing. It feels good. Even if I haven’t used that extra time to read infinite jest again.
I scaled it back a bit. No checking FB on the weekends, and removed the app from my phone. It helped…kinda.
that’s what i’m talking about! but first i feel like i gotta break this everyday compulsion before i dive back in.
I’ll step away from Facebook for a minute with ya. (Not counting Willow Springs’ account, of course.) I may not do so til next quarter, though. Reading thesis books in lieu of Facebook during social networking urges probably won’t work as well as I idealistically think it will, but it’s worth a shot.
I hate that I check facebook obsessively.
There’s a huge corpus of conditioning research out there that winds up being pretty applicable to facebook—for example, the most effective conditioning tools (read: addicting) are those that give unpredictably-but-regularly spaced rewards. So, if you’re gambling, the casinos have the win-loss ratio pretty optimally figured out to keep you pressing that lever. And if you’re facebooking, the extent of your compulsion has a lot to do with the size and activity of your social network. For people whose networks update at a certain rate, they have to check it on a smaller time scale—otherwise they might miss an update that they’re interested in.
But if my facebook friends are pretty checked-off of the internet, I’m not going to check it that often. Maybe daily, or weekly, because the probability of finding something interesting is low.
Just imagine if the postman came more than once a day, and irregularly. We’d be checking the mailbox much more frequently! Here in Seattle, Amaro and I get mail five of the six countable days of the week, and we check daily. Living alone in Spokane, I got mail once a week, tops, and I probably only checked once a week. Some mail sat in there for two or three weeks before I got to it.
So, break your conditioning, and in doing so, help everyone else in your social network break their’s too, just a little bit.
[...] mike doughty inspired me to quit facebook, i guess he’s also now sort of responsible for inspiring this (potentially asinine) [...]